Episode #757 - From Corporate Maverick To Compassionate Leader with Bill George

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Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Hello everyone. We're talking with Bill George. Bill, welcome.

Thank you very much, Larry. Great to be with you and.

Good to give you a little respite from that beautiful, balmy weather up there in Minnesota.

Yes, exactly. You get to be in Palm beach while I'm in Minnesota. Anyway, it's been a mild winter so far. It's not like the rest of the country. We're having huge storms, so we're surviving wonderful.

Well, spring is on the way and it's nice to kick off the year with a bang. And it's exciting to be able to talk to you today about your road. And as you've, as you know, we like to dig into the success of people who have been able to find success in their life. And as we start out, we, they were, I was talking to some of our staff earlier, they were talking about adjustments. And I said, well, you know, they wanted a quick little thing on adjustments. I said adjustments is the game. You know, everyone's got to adjust because you don't know what you're going to need to do when you start out. You don't know your skills, your contacts, your anything. And you have to figure out, you have to learn, you have to be, you know, the people that are willing to be flexible and go through the process get there a lot faster, you know, and so I know that you made a lot of right choices along the way and congratulations on your success. I mean, if we went forever, you know, we could go forever talking about your, you know, your achievements, the companies you've run, the boards that you've been on. But we'll get to that. But when you started out, I mean, you've, you work for the guy. You know what I'm curious about, Bill, I think that would be fun today is to see how you can be a success in business. And then you wind up evolving and you get pulled into the boards of major companies on Goldman Sachs and to get on the executive fellow at Harvard Business and working with the Navy. And from a success in business, you can get pulled into a lot of directions because they need leaderships, gung ho, trustworthy leadership everywhere. And so the big institutions really are looking for outstanding people to bring in and work with them. And so it's going to be interesting to hear how that happened and unfolded for you. So I'm sure Harvard was not calling when you graduated from Georgia Tech. So. But anyway, actually you went to Harvard right after Georgia Tech. So anyway, let's go, let's get into it and what was the driving for? Let's go way back and by the way, between me, just to get on the same page, I'm a Georgia Tech graduate myself.

Yeah, I know that. Congratulations. What field did you graduate in?

Well, I started at. I started in architecture and I wanted a career in art but I didn't have any role models that I could could show me a way to make a career out of either photography or art. So I went into architecture and knew nothing about it. And about halfway through I found out there was going to be three years of working at minimum wage as a draftsman after you graduated at five year degree. And I said, you know what? No. So I changed major, got into building construction and graduated and built 100 houses in the north side of Atlanta right out of Georgia.

So good for you. Well, great school I must say. I had an uncle who got to be a well known architect. His name was John Dinkler, who was Errol Saarinen's partner of course. And Errol died and he took over the firm and promoted Kevin Roach to be his colleague as a designer. So was Dinkeloo and Roach. But the significant thing is we. I grew up in the south side of Chicago and we. My mother used to have to take food to her brother's house on Sundays because He was making $50 a week and with four kids, Larry. So wow, tough call. That was with Skidnar, Owens and Merrill that you course heard of. And then he landed with Saarinen and the rest is history, shall we say. And got designed some very prominent buildings. But the more important thing is you're absolutely right. But hey, I could never be an architect. I don't have the creative skills you have or I couldn't be an artist either. You just got to do what you can do.

Yeah, well I'll tell you this. And it's just not something that people think about. But you are an artist, Bill, in the way that you have gone through your life because you creatively have been forced to creatively solve problems. That's why they have the leadership, the people in leadership they have is because nobody else can figure it out and no one's got the instincts they need. And if you look back, you've probably been a good bit of an artist all the way through your career. And in designing that thing and designing Solutions and coming up with things that help other people at all. And so what would you say is a driving force for you coming up before you got to tech, you know, before you're in Chicago, you know, what were your exposures? What were your motivations? What were your role models, let's say.

Well, when I was about nine years old, eight and a half, we moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. I grew up. My father came to me at 9, believe it or not, said, son, I feel like I failed to become a leader. He was, I thought, a very good consultant in Booz Allen and Hamilton. And he said, I want you to become the leader and never became and effectively make up for my failures. And so he said, I'd like you to be CEO of a company. He even named the companies. One of them was Coca Cola down in Atlanta that you know well. And he said, you know, you could be CEO of that company, son, or there's another company in, in Ohio named Procter and Gamble. And of course I never heard of these companies and emerging a little computer company out in the east coast called IBM. And he was very serious. And you know, I junior high and high school, I joined lots of organization, never selected lead anything, never liked the student council, even a good enough tennis player to play a couple years of college. 10. I wasn't even co captain of my high school tennis team, won the state championship. But I threw my hat in the ring for being president of the senior class in high school. And when the votes came in, I lost by a margin of 2 to 1. So you can see the kids at my school didn't think I was much of a leader. So then me for punishment, off to Atlanta. Why did I go 830 miles away from home? I could have gone to Michigan. I want a smaller school, Atlanta, play tennis year round and a lot of attractive females there. But the real reason I wanted to escape myself. But then I took myself with me. I ran for office six more times, lost all six. And I can tell you, Larry, the best thing that ever happened to me, some seniors at Georgia Tech pulled me aside and said, bill, no one's ever going to want to work with you, much less be led by you, because you're moving so fast to get ahead. You don't take time for other people. And that was like a blow to the solar plexus because, you know, they were right. Leadership is not about building a resume. It was like I was building a resume instead of a life. It's about relationships. And I had to learn that. And So I worked very hard the next two, three years at Georgia Tech, three years to learn that and was able to hold a lot of leadership roles. And because I really believe at a deep level, Larry, that leaders make the difference. Bad leaders destroy organizations. We saw this happen to General Electric, one of the great organizations of the world. We've seen the problems Boeing's having in real time right now because of some things past leaders did. But great leaders built great organizations. I mean, we can see this in what Tim Cook's done with Apple and Satya Nadella and Microsoft. We could talk a lot of these, about a lot of these leaders, but I really believe it's leadership that makes the difference. You don't do it by yourself, but you build a team. Like you were saying, you have to build a great team. We had a great example of leadership. Jim Harbaugh with Michigan just won the national championship.

Correct? Correct.

And it was really interesting. He had at. I went to the Alabama game, to the Rose bowl game and got to see that. And our boss said after the game, he said, J.J. mcNamara is the best quarterback in Michigan history. So after McNamara or not McNamara, anyway, he, after he won the national championship, okay. They asked him, jj, what do you say about what your coach said? Are you the greatest quarterback in Michigan history? And he says, my name's jj, I'm from lagrange, Illinois, and I'm proud to be a Michigan Wolverine. Because he knew it was all about the team. He was smart enough to say he couldn't have done any of those things without all those big guys in the line blocking all those defenders who could stop Alabama on the three yard line, you know, without that team. And so he realized that really, when you're a great leader, it's not about you. I know CEOs get in the spotlight and get a lot of the credit they don't deserve, but they build a team around them and that's what it's all about. Okay.

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Notes. As you came up, let's just say as you're going through your Georgia Tech years, you get that message and you had to make changes. Can you recall what kind of changes? How that, how did that play out to where things turned around for you? Because again, when we get a direction, when we get the word in our life insight that we need to make a directional change, it doesn't come with a manual about how you as your, with your personality and your setup should go about step one, step two, step three to make those adjustments and changes. But you know, somehow we figure it out. Can you recall how that played out that you were being. You were able to successfully go, you know, morph into a different type person and you know, with different priorities and the way you looked at people and all that. Develop the filters on, you know, what people said to you and how you responded and all of that. How did that happen?

I remember like it was yesterday. I remembered vividly. I. I lacked a lot of self awareness, a lot of the qualities I'm touting for leaders now, like really deep concern for other people. And I had a reputation of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. So I went back and talked to some of the.

Where did that come from? Let me just say where did that come from? You know, because there's a lot of.

But I had to get rid of it.

But you know, you just wonder what that. You know, we have people around us quite frequently. They just seem to blurt out the wrong thing at the wrong time. And it's just a lack of. Probably goes back to lack of awareness of the other people around you, right?

Exactly. Like I teach in a classroom with Larry, with Larry, with 90 people now I've got to be aware at how 90 people are responding. Not just what they say, but I got to watch their facial expression. So I train myself to learn how to do this. See, I think people always ask me, are leaders made or born? I think you're born with certain gifts, but you have to develop those gifts. You're like an athlete. No one became a great athlete just because they were born with athletic gifts. They have to practice every day. A great pianist, you know, you've got to be playing the piano, practicing every day. Great athletes do that. And it's the same with leaders. You have to practice your sharpen your leadership skills. So I had a lot to learn. I went around back and talk to a number of the people that rejected me and you know, to find out and got some very good feedback. Great leaders seek feedback and counsel. And so I needed a lot of feedback and it helped me a lot. I'm still very dedicated to a group of people that were there for me and helped me through that process. That kind of enabled me to start to take on some leadership roles and see how I did. And to be more that turned out.

Turned out to be an incredible. Give you an incredible advantage right out of the gate. Leaving Georgia Tech, having had that experience and gone through that transition before, you went out there and made a name for yourself in business as the guy who says the wrong thing at the wrong time. And, you know, it's better to have that in the academic environment. And how did having a few more of those skills impact your career trajectory going forward?

Well, it was everything. And, you know, I still had to learn. I'm still. I tend to want to like, you're talking about problem solving. I want to dig in and solve the problem. You have to know when to drive people, when to sit back and delegate to them, when to let them do the job, when to challenge them, when to criticize them, when not to, when to give them support and concern. You have to do all of those things. It's a very nuanced job. That's why a lot of people don't do it well. They're kind of like one trick ponies. They can do one thing, but they can't. They have. They aren't flexible in how they approach people and see what people's deeper needs are. So I've spent starting then, I've spent a tremendous amount of time in my life, right till today of mentoring people. And I started that a little in high school on, on math. But in college, I spent a tremendous amount of time mentoring people just one, two, three years younger than I was and going and understanding them. And I carry that, you know, all through my career and every job I ever had. In Harvard Business School, I used to spend money teaching MBAs. I'm just teaching executives now. I was teaching MBA, spend two and a half, three hours a day with MBAs in my office. They didn't want to talk about my course. They want to talk about life. They want to talk about, hey, how do I handle a two career family, you know, with my husband who's going to be in Hong Kong, and I've got to be here, how are we going to do this? And you know, and so now, even now, I spend a lot of time getting calls from CEOs and other people at leadership roles at all ages, all the way down to their twenties, just talk confidentially about problems. So I love doing that. In fact, you know, I would say I've never had a job, Larry, where I knew more about the actual work to be done than the people reported to me. They always, every job I ever had, they knew more than I did. So my skill had to be to bring out the best in them. So I've decided my purpose is to help leaders reach their full potential. And I can say now I was doing that all the way back at Georgia Tech and trying to help groom some people who want to take on leadership roles in organizations at Georgia Tech, taking what I'd learned and trying to share it with them.

Yeah, you've raised something. I'd like to take a, a diversion back to something you open, opened up and then we'll get back on our track. But how do you deal with a two career family where one's got a job in Hong Kong and this, that the other, how do you do that? I, I, I can guess, but I, I'll have you. Well, take, take the floor.

Not too bad when you're newly married or newly partnered up. It gets tough when you have kids. And Penny, my wife and I have always had two careers. But you know, and we had a deal early on in our marriage. We're going to do 50, 50, whether it's the dishes or cooking dinner or cleaning the house or all this stuff. And she would say to me right today, well, how do you think that worked when you went to Japan for 10 days on business and I've got two little kids at home and I'm working, you know. Yeah. And so it's really hard. And I see this with my own sons and daughter in laws, both of whom have to dual careers and young kids at home. It's really hard when kids are young and you just gotta work and you can't do much else. As my son John, who is a surgeon, his wife does procedures and for gynecology says, you know, and they have to commute an hour each way. They say, you know, we don't have any time to do anything, dad, except work and kids. We don't have time to get really involved in the community. In fact, he says, I feel my work is my service, you know, trying to save people's lives and surgery, but I don't have time to join this organization or that he does go to his son's soccer games. But yeah, it's hard, very hard. And I think you have to kind of adapt what you do to the right time in your life as well. You know, there is a hard period and that particularly in the 30s and sometimes early 40s were really, that's the toughest time.

Well, it help travel when you're thrown into it, you feel like this is going to be the way it is forever. How can I do? You know. But it helps to have the perspective. This is, it might be a long stage, but this is just a stage, you know, things will change, you know, the kid, kids grow up, you know, and you know, somehow if you've got the right attitude and willing to be flexible, if you can make it work, if you want to make it work, you know.

And so the other thing I would say, Larry, is a bit of pragmatic advice. Assuming you can afford it. Farm out all the things you don't like to do. You know, you got to have someone to come in and take care of the kids or clean the house or, you know, do some of the mechanical things. I'm not mechanical anyway. Farm out the things you're not good at or don't like to do and have someone come in. My, my sons have had au pairs that come in from outside the U.S. they're great. They keep things going during, during the day and, you know, everyone's away.

So yeah, I, I things is even if, you know you're limited financially. I know one young mother told me, you know, she did, he had three kids. She didn't mind washing the clothes. She despised folding the clothes. So she said, I figured out I could just put them in a big basket or bag, take them down to the laundry and give them 20 bucks and they fold all the week's clothing.

Wow.

And that took the pressure off of me, you know, so, you know, you know, you just think about things, you know, within the limitations of what you got to work with and so let's go now. We leave Georgia Tech and you go up to Harvard. Is that right?

Yeah, I went straight through. I worked for IBM for a summer, by the way. I worked for all three companies. I spent a summer at Procter and Gamble after my junior year and I went to IBM after my graduated. And then I went straight through those days. You could go straight through today. The business schools don't want you to come. They want you to get some work easy. Maybe I should have, but maybe I was too to get ahead. So yeah, I went straight through.

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